Yep it’s time for the best of lists to start rolling out. Publishers Weekly traditionally starts the process and here’s the five graphic novels on the Best Books list:
The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, Sonny Liew (Pantheon)
How to Survive in the North, Luke Healy (Nobrow)
March: Book Three, John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell (Top Shelf)
The One Hundred Nights of Hero: A Graphic Novel, Isabel Greenberg (Little, Brown)
Rosalie Lightning: A Graphic Memoir, Tom Hart (St. Martin’s)
As always picking just five was brutal! And there’s more to come….
I hope the Box Brown book, Tetris is on that list.
After seeing this list, I spotted The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye at B&N and decided to give it a look. I hadn’t read any reviews or anything about it, so my first impression was one of frustration:
As a style chameleon myself, I recognize how much hard work went into it. But because it’s not up-front about being fiction, and because I could recognize almost immediately much of this “old” art was “fake,” I spent most of the story distracted with trying to figure out how much was or wasn’t fiction instead of just enjoying the story.
On top of that, I still don’t actually know how much — if any — of the Singapore history is even true, since the main character was fictional, and the mention of alt-history The Man In The High Castle suggests it could all be made up. If the Singapore stuff was true and this was an attempt to get people interested in reading about it, I felt it was a failure in that regard.
Still, the style changes were fun, even if it was only in a Kill Bill kind of way that’s more surface than substance.
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